1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to interface technologies and in particular to display interface technologies. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to an improved method and system for autonomically managing an electronic meeting calendar.
2. Description of the Related Art
The need to collaborate with other individuals is sometimes essential for team-driven projects to be completed. Such collaboration is largely achieved when one member of a team (e.g., a meeting owner) schedules a meeting with the various other members of the team (i.e., meeting invitees). However, the meeting owner's scheduling task becomes increasingly difficult as a result of the invitees' conflicting schedules. In some situations, a meeting invitee that is of high rank within an organization may receive more meeting invitations than is physically possible for that person to attend. As a result, negotiation is sometimes undertaken to draw a high-ranking invitee to accept the invitation to a particular meeting.
Under existing calendar systems, the acts of (a) scheduling a meeting and (b) determining the viability that the meeting will take place at the scheduled date and time are largely manual process that is performed by the meeting owner. While, existing calendar systems sometimes permit a meeting owner to view the individual schedules of the meeting invitees, the meeting owner is ultimately responsible for manually determining the most convenient time to schedule the meeting. In cases where there are schedule conflicts, the meeting owner must directly communicate with the conflicted invitees to arrive at a scheduling compromise. Other manual steps that the meeting owner must undertake in the scheduling and meeting viability determination processes include: (i) timely checking each returned response (i.e., acceptance or rejection) from the various invitees, (ii) tallying the returned responses, and (iii) determining whether a quorum of critical invitees has been reached. Following these manual tasks, if it is determined that the scheduled meeting will not take place, the meeting owner must go back through the same manual steps to re-schedule the meeting in a new time slot. Such methods and systems for managing a meeting calendar are not time efficient for a meeting owner.